A central paradigm for most uncovering psychotherapies is that the removal or alteration of a defense enables a patient to become aware of mental contents which he had formerly warded off by the defense. Our first objective is to study this paradigm empirically. How is an initially unconscious defense changed during such a therapeutic course? How does that change enable the patient to tolerate a mental content which had formerly been too threatening? The relationship between changes in a defense and the emergence into consciousness of formerly warded-off contents is being studied in several psychoanalyses, using process notes data supplemented by audio-recording. Clinical inference is required initially to identify defenses and their manifestations, but measures which can be scored reliably by independent observers are developed to fit the specific case, and other procedures are being explored (including a prediction study) to control various sources of subjectivity, bias, and error. In addition, other methods of investigating how patients in psychoanalysis become able to experience formerly warded-off mental contents are being developed.